The passage of time represents the greatest barrier to “transitional justice” efforts to identify and rectify abuses from the martial law era, politicians and activists said yesterday at a forum organized by the online news outlet Taiwan People News, emphasizing that any further progress would be premised on new information about individual cases.
“A lot of international experience simply cannot be transplanted directly to Taiwan because we have been too slow to pursue transitional justice,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said. “Under current circumstances, we do not have any absolute grasp on how much we can accomplish.”
“Holding people responsible is tangled up with the issues of the wishes of victims and just how many people would be willing to bring lawsuits after almost 30 years is problematic, as is exactly how many files are still hiding somewhere and have not been made public after all this time,” he added.
The DPP has made the pursuit of transitional justice a legislative priority, proposing bills to establish a special investigative committee, confiscate “illegal” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) assets and publicize related government documents.
Activist Wang Pao-hsuan (王寶萱) — whose doctoral research in political philosophy focused on transitional justice — said proposed amendments to the Archives Act (檔案法) were the most crucial piece of the DPP’s legislative agenda, because any further progress would rest on clarifying how abuses played out on an individual level.
“Our society does not need any investigative reports to give us ‘conclusions’ at a macro level,” she said, adding that a fuller picture on individual stories was essential to spark a full discussion on what happened.
Meaningful changes to judicial and police culture can only be effected only if society wrestles with the complex background of many victims of the White Terror era, many of whom had some kind of communist background, she said.
“If you package them all as completely innocent and defenseless victims, there is no possibility of dialogue, because that is not the truth,” she said. “We should look at the strongest arguments the KMT could raise — such as wanting to protect liberal democracy — and then look at what those targeted actually did. Even if some people had communist dreams, was it really right for the KMT to break apart their lives?”
Ketagalan Academy president Chang Fu-mei (張富美) said that previous efforts to release documents during the administration of former DPP president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had been hampered by Ministry of National Defense stonewalling, with a portion of related documents having been transferred to the KMT’s archives.
Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation executive secretary Yeh Hung-ling (葉虹靈) said that following years of focus on the 228 Incident, cases of abuse perpetrated during the White Terror era are the missing piece in putting together a full picture of the consequences of authoritarian rule.
“The government has already put a lot of resources into investigating and commemorating the 228 Incident,” she said, citing historical memory projects, as well as a national holiday and memorial.
“Forty years of martial rule had a more lasting impact on Taiwanese society, but we still do not even know how many people were affected and what they were charged with,” she added.
The 228 Massacre was a series of killings carried out by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party that followed a national uprising that began on Feb. 27, 1947.
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